Jacques Piou

Jacques Piou (6 August 1838-12 May 1932) was a member of the Chamber of Deputies from 1885 to 1893, from 1898 to 1902, and from 1906 to 1919. Piou was the founder of the Christian democratic and liberal-conservative Popular Liberal Action party, which he later led into a fusion with the Republican Federation in 1919.

Biography
Jacques Piou was born in Angers, France on 6 August 1838, and he worked as a lawyer in Toulouse before entering politics. Piou was a conservative Catholic, and he emerged as a leader of the Catholic "Rallies" (Catholics who rallied to the French Third Republic by order of the Papacy) during the 1880s before first being elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1885. In 1901, he founded the Popular Liberal Action party with the support of Pope Leo XIII, hoping to create a "Tory" party in France through a fusion of conservative republicans and the "Rallies". He became the party's president, and he turned it into the first formal right-wing party in the country's history. However, he failed to bring together all of the forces of the center-right, and, in 1919, he decided to unite the republican right by merging his party into the Republican Federation. He died in Paris in 1932 at the age of 93.